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Bodies Politic by Roy Porter, Reaktion Books, £25, ISBN 186189094X

A FEAST for mind and eye is laid before you in Roy Porter’s Bodies Politic.
Here are galleries of cartoons—Rowlandsons, Gillrays and
Cruikshanks—all satirising doctors and their methods. Practitioners and
patients are hideous in appearance and so are the remedies depicted. Quacks
abound. Huge wordy balloons are tethered to mouths. Public opinion of
18th-century doctors and surgeons shows in names such as Sir Valiant Venery and
Dr Peter Putrid.

But the 19th century saw the shift from the barber’s shop to Harley Street,
pinstriped trousers and gravitas. Scientific discovery revolutionised medicine,
and doctors’ reputations with it. By 1900, a cartoon doctor (usually in Punch)
was a top-hatted figure, a man of distinction who could be asked to dinner at
the best houses. This is a fascinating progress, told with lots of humour and
copious extracts from contemporary writing throughout the period.

Bodies Politic is part of a series called “Picturing History”, this
a wonderfully enjoyable read—and it is wonderfully illustrated, too. It
covers the development of medicine and knowledge of the human body during two
centuries, from the late 17th to the end of the 19th. It’s a pity that it stops
where it does. There was no shortage of quacks and miraculous cures in the 20th
century.